


steady as we move

by achapterends



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Beaches, Bioluminescence, Painting, Poetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 15:56:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10722504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achapterends/pseuds/achapterends
Summary: Louis is beautiful, especially when he lights up.





	steady as we move

**Author's Note:**

> this is basically just an ode to louis from zayn's pov
> 
> in short: he glow, everyone love him
> 
> please leaves kudos and comments if you enjoy it keeps me alive !
> 
> title from panther by made in heights

They buy a house on the beach. A quaint little thing, with wooden shutters and a wraparound porch. The porch opens out onto a vast expanse of sand that stretches down to the shoreline. Zayn collects seashells in a mason jar that he keeps on the windowsill in the kitchen. 

Sometimes, Zayn paints. He uses watercolours because he finds them easier to work with than acrylics, and he particularly enjoys watching the colours disperse across the canvas when he puts paintbrush to easel. He paints the sea, and the sky. He’s tried his hand at still life, positioning fruit bowls at various angles. He likes to paint dogs, but it’s a terrible nuisance to get them to sit still. He paints mountain ranges and unexplored deserts. Mostly, though, he paints Louis.

Louis on the beach. At 2 o'clock in the morning, when it’s pitch black outside save for the basky glow of the moon and the stars. Louis will pad out of bed in a quiet avoidance of rousing Zayn from sleep, but his bare feet will creak against the old floorboards and wake him up anyway. Zayn will pretend otherwise, wait until Louis has slid past the glass doors and onto the boardwalk that winds down towards the sea before he moves an inch.

Zayn will eventually follow him, and set up his canvas in the window that overlooks the beach. He begins with painting Louis in the dim light of the sitting room, with barely anything to go on but the memory of him and his vague figure in the distance. Louis is a beautiful subject, and quite often the muse for anything Zayn does. He has sharp cheekbones and long, sweeping eyelashes, a petite build and shapely hips. His eyes are like the ocean. Zayn thinks that Louis was born from the waves, is one with the sea. He was always destined to live alongside it, and Zayn is thankful he gets to share it with him.

Tonight is no different. Louis gently brushes Zayn’s arm as he slips from under the covers and heads outside, feet bare, arms riddled with goosebumps from the breeze. He tiptoes down to the edge of the water and lets the tide lap at his feet. Zayn captures all this from his comfortable viewing spot with each swift flick of his paintbrush. As if Louis were the feature of an art exhibition, and Zayn an awed tourist. He can’t keep his eyes off Louis as he wades in and out of the rockpools. He’s breathtaking. Zayn is obsessed. 

Outside, Louis listens intently to the soft roar of the ocean. He closes his eyes and breathes in, breathes out. Breathe in. Breathe out. He can taste the salty air on the tip of his tongue.

When he opens his eyes, he notices an aura of blue around his toes. Slowly, as the tide washes in, it spreads, becoming greater and more saturated until his entire bottom half is bathed in neon light. 

From the bay window, Zayn watches wide-eyed. He’s seen this before, it happens on occasion. When the moon is full, when the planets align. Everything has to be right. Each time, it’s more stunning.

Without averting his gaze from Louis, Zayn dips the end of his paintbrush into a shade of electric blue, and begins dabbing at the canvas.

Louis remembers learning about phytoplankton at school. Before, he had never witnessed the natural beauty of bioluminescence. Now, the creatures flock to him. Fireflies and jellyfish and little organisms that live in the depths of the water are to Louis what a moth is to a flame. Drawn in, inexplicably. Like he is their God. 

Louis is merely a mortal creature in the macro sense of it all. It’s incomprehensible to him that he should be worshipped, when he’s no more special than the Earth’s creatures. They were here before he was, and will be when he’s gone. He’s drifting somewhere in between, aimlessly, sublimely. He doesn’t know why he feels at home on the beach, when he’s glowing head to toe, lit up by the emission of his own light. It took him by surprise when it first happened, but then it felt like everything he’d been waiting for, and he welcomed it without question.

Louis feels like a piece of him was missing and suddenly he’s whole again whenever he stands by the sea and lets the water take him, turning him bright and brilliant and radiant. He feels a connection to nature, to Zayn, and within himself. 

He has never met anyone remotely similar. Perhaps he isn’t the only person in the world with this gift. Perhaps he is.

In Zayn’s eyes, he is regardless. Louis is the most wonderfully exquisite creation. He’s almost immortalised in Zayn’s idolisation of him. Zayn’s adoration, his unconditional affection. Zayn could write sonnet after sonnet about Louis, or make music, but he paints him instead. 

The walls of their secluded beach house are lined with portraits of the man he devotes his life to. 

Louis stays outside until the sun begins to come up, milky and orange. One by one, he shakes his limbs off until the remaining plankton fall from his wet skin and into the water. The fireflies jump from his shoulders and soar off into the sky, back to wherever it is they journeyed from.

And Louis trudges back up to the house. He follows the boardwalk, the rays of the morning sun warming his back. He wordlessly crawls into bed beside Zayn. Zayn, who is sleeping soundly. Not undisturbed, however, for he too stayed up all night watching Louis from afar. They don’t tend to talk about it much, but they both know what the routine is when it’s the particular time of year in which Louis is bioluminescent. They follow suit every night until it's over and they welcome it again the following cycle.

It always ends like this: Zayn’s t-shirt covered in paint, a colourful canvas propped up against a wall, Louis’ heart full, and his arms wrapped around Zayn’s waist in a silent declaration of undying love.


End file.
